Welcome. We're less than a year into this project, and obviously COVID has impacted what we have and haven't been able to achieve; however, we (all of us on the co-design team from EdGE at TERC and from Landmark College) have already learned a lot and are looking to exciting years of design and research ahead. We'd love to talk with designers, researchers, educators, and others who are interested in (1) working with and/or for neurodiverse learners, (2) designing and developing virtual reality and/or games for learning, and (3) delving more into the co-design process.

Thank you for bringing attention to the needs of neurodiverse learners and the benefits of co-design. It is of utmost importance that the design centers on the users’ needs. I think it might be important for others to learn about the specific challenges and benefits experienced by the designers and stakeholders working together in your co-design team. Also, I would like to learn more about how you might measure the impact of the free choice educational games like this one on students’ learning.

Once again, thank you for this critically important work.

This is a great project!  I am also very interested in hearing more and learning more about measuring the impact of educational games on students' learning.  

Hi, Rivka.

To be clear up front, this project largely isn't measuring the impact of free-choice educational games on students' learning, though we will be looking at this some and the EdGE team has, and is currently working on, projects where such measurement is more central.

For this project, we're focusing on what features of game puzzles and user interfaces show promise to engage and support neurodiverse learners, especially learners with autism and/or sensory, attention, and social anxiety differences. What we're trying to support includes STEM-content learning and problem-solving practices, so we can't—and don't want to—ignore that learning, but the focus is a little different.

Fortunately, good game design gets us, in this case, largely where we want to go in terms of the learning. If a player is able to solve a puzzle or complete a task they have demonstrated a certain level of implicit understanding. The design challenge, of course, is in making sure the mechanics of the puzzles and tasks are built around and require that understanding. And we're beginning to think about the broader context, with what an informal learning setting could offer around and building from the game.

In other projects, such as our work with the game Zoombinis, we consider the roles of educators and support materials in bridging between the in-game implicit learning and the explicit learning desired in classrooms and (sometimes) informal learning settings. And for the research, we look at both what the player is doing in the game (analyzing click data) and what they are able to express verbally, through classroom work, and through various assessments, which we're still working on refining.

I'd be happy to communicate more with you about this VR game work and/or the other game-based learning projects and research.

Teon and team,

Great video! I really enjoyed learning about your work. Thank you for implementing such a creative approach that builds STEM skills and social skills. 

I wanted to share about our NSF-funded, no-cost summer program for high school students across the United States called Neuroscience for Neurodiverse Learners (NNL). Our free online summer program is for high school students who identify as neurodiverse learners. The virtual program will run weekdays, August 9-20. Students receive an introduction to neuroscience and neural engineering, neuroethics, and scientific communication. The goal is to provide students exposure to the field of neural engineering and provide basic preparation for college studies in STEM subjects as well as future STEM careers. Applications for our free summer program are available now.

Hi Teon;

Great video and great project! I always keep an eye on the excellent work that TERC and Landmark do together! I am currently on a NASA-funded project where my team will be engaging in a co-design process with neurodiverse high schoolers and their teachers to create informal programs that draw on existing NASA resources. I really appreciate the advice you provided about how to structure the co-design meetings that you gave in your earlier post. I was intrigued by the last comment in your video, that your co-designers "bring something new to the table every week." Can you give an example or two of design decisions that arose from having a neurodiverse team working on the game? 

Hi, Wendy.

I'm happy to provide a few examples. First let me start by saying one of my earliest lessons related to letting go to a certain level of control. The Landmark interns are part of the co-design team because they are neurodiverse stakeholders; however, that does NOT mean the only things they bring to the table can be obviously or directly connected their neurodiversity. On one hand, this is obvious. On the other, it had real implications for where they wanted to spend their time and attention. They're helping to shape the game, not "just" the parts of the game we said we were going to focus on for broadening STEM-learning participation by neurodiverse players.

First, the Minos. As you watch the video, you'll see various drawings of and references to Minos, which are the fictional cephalopod-like creatures envisioned to be the top of the food chain in the oceans of Europa... for this game. One of the Landmark interns got excited about the astrobiology possibilities of the moon, proposed the Minos, and spent a good deal of time (in partnership with an EdGE designer) crafting the lifecycle and ecosystem of these creatures. These creatures have become central to the game, and co-design team efforts have included providing iterative guidance on the Minos artwork to our development partner MXTreality, designing a player task related to testing what the Minos do and don't like in terms of stimuli, working out details of how the Minos communicate with each other, designing a means of visualizing tracking data for the Minos and connecting this to the story, etc. Many aspects of this have no obvious connections to sensory, attention, and/or social anxiety difference, to neurodiverse-friendly user interfaces, etc. However, connections arise...  or they don't... and either is fine.

Another example is the centrality of communication to the game. It's a STEM-learning game, and I thought about it in that context; communication, as a theme, wasn't even on my radar screen. A neurodiverse EdGE member of the co-design team got us thinking about the importance of empathy (obvious social anxiety connections); a Landmark member of the team added in thoughts and concerns about the player being alone/isolate on Europa and about experiences possibly being overwhelming (obvious sensory and social anxiety connections); and the entire team has since been thinking through different ways these and related ideas might play out. For instance, it's probably not surprising EM spectrum puzzles have been proposed as potential STEM connections, but they're being explored as more than that. Say the Minos largely see different wavelengths than we do. How might a player figure that out? What might this mean in terms of communication between the player and the (high animal-level intelligence) Minos? How can this be used to explore ideas related to different means of communicating being fine and the working out of finding common ground? How might a player explore and learn about their own input tolerances as they explore the inputs the Minos prefer? Etc.

Those are a couple of large ones,  but of course, many contributions for all team members are smaller: thoughts on STEM-related puzzles, guidance on how to make the companion robot approachable/friendly, opinions  about when maps should be 2D vs 3D for navigation, requests for tools that help track the options open to the player without overly directing them, input on different colors as we shaped our early research, suggestions for backstory/lore elements, etc.

Hope this is helpful. Would be happy to communicate more, if you're interested.

Exciting work!

Quick question - is this headset only or will it be available also on laptops? 

Your team is an excellent application of the "nothing about us without us" idea.  I appreciate the level of thought that you've put into designing the collaboration structures that your team uses and know that many of these structures would help in most teams and classrooms.

I'm curious about your longer-term plans for using this game in the classroom.  How do you envision rolling it out to teachers and students?  Do you see it playing a role in teaching specific curriculum objectives or will it be an enrichment activity?  What grade level and population of students do you home to eventually reach?

I like the motivation for this project!  How do you plan to disseminate your game once it is complete?

 There are so many aspects of this project that I admire and am impressed by that I can't pick just one to comment on! I have learned so much about the possibilities of participatory research just from this three minute video; thank you for doing this work and presenting it here. 

From some of your responses to comments above, it seems like one particularly engaging aspect of this project for neurodiverse team members might be the story-building components where they are able to think through and design the rules of the world you're creating in the game. It makes me think of some potential humanistic STEM applications (perhaps with science fiction creative writing, philosophy, ethics, film studies) in which the very act of building this game could be especially engaging for neurodiverse learners. From a sort of meta perspective in your experiences so far, could you see something ongoing beyond this game that has students contribute to STEM learning game development be a program in and of itself? In other words, a two-part program of neurodiverse STEM learning games created by neurodiverse STEM learners where both the resulting games themselves and the process of game development are core programmatic features?

Thank you for sharing your co-design strategy with us especially your the "nothing about us without us" idea. My question is similar to Wendy's above but I'm more curious about what recommendations you might have for teachers who are interested in co-designing lessons and activities with neurodiverse students in their classrooms. Are there any strategies that you and your team have used or plan to try that you would recommend? 

I love this project! You have beautifully modeled inclusion and that the best outcome is often not the fastest or easier approach. What advice do you have about encouraging faculty to engage students in curriculum design knowing it will be a much slower process?

I am looking forward to being able to review and use your new VR game.  As Director of a Center for Learning in the Digital Age, I am always on the look out for interesting examples that leverage technology in transformational ways - as your game promises to do.  Once your game is done and made public, I'd love to be able to advertise it/ link to it from our website!

Such wonderful work and experience! The intentional focus on neurodiverse learners is so important and it will be great to follow this project's work. 

I've always been impressed with Landmark College's programs.  Kudos to your team for putting this incredible experience together!